My school has been primarily blackboard, but some of my classes were actually ported to canvas at the beginning of the spring term.
I have to say canvas is a lot friendlier and actually a joy to use. I dont know if its how my school has Blackboard signed up, but just the fact that I stay authenticated for longer than 10 minutes is a nice step up.
Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.
I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.
They have a lot of good authors who focus on different aspects of design and architecture.
I also enjoyed Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck.
It is not so much on the architecture of the system, but focuses on the implementation of classes and routines.
Are they a VC firm you would like to work with? It is as if you are taking investment money from them if you are an EIR. I would do the same due diligence you would do if you were taking capital from them.
Talk to some of the companies in their portfolio and see what they think of the VCs.
Good point emilam. I've reached out to a few of their portfolio companies and had a good conversation with one. That CEO gave a glowing review, but one doesn't constitute a pattern, so I'll definitely keep asking around.
"... programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake." - The icing on the cake is the important part. A lot of communities forget the base steps such as the meetups and the forums and they jump right to the funding. This limit the growth of the entrepreneurs and the community just as Brad discusses.
Completely agree. Part of what makes these communities thrive is the passion and innovation of everyone involved. If there wasn't constant discussion going on at every level, there wouldn't be anything to fund in the first place.
I think Brad's points exemplify why New York City will succeed as Silicon Alley. It's NOT the same as Silicon Valley, which is exactly why it's needed.
Creativity and persistence are great, but the time still needs to be channelled in a constructive way. Otherwise you end up with products no one wants or ruining something with new many scope creep and feature bloat.
I've enjoyed the hackers and founders meetup in mountain view. I really do enjoy how unstructured it is compared to Launch Up and the Web Startup Group.
I've been to one in SF and one in Mountain View. In SF, people basically showed up, the organizer had pizza (which sponsors paid for - in that case it was WePay and MixPanel), and people just talked and hung out. Very informal. Very low-key.
In Mountain View it was the same story, except for the first 30 minutes or so there was a talk on the evolution of db technology and pros/cons of different platforms.
This reminds me of when Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from their users' kindles. It seemed to just piss users off, and is kind of a scary feature.
I don't know how disruptive your app is, but Geoffrey A. Moore goes into detail on this in his book Crossing the Chasm. He discusses how the support from others(such as this book) boosts your product in the eyes of your customers and future customers.
